BattleTech Vs. Lancer | Other Games Open (2024)

Heeey, amigos. I've been pondering the purchase of BattleTech Alpha Strike (Commander's Edition), but I've just learned of Lancer - which seems like maybe a more "complete" game since it includes PC playing as well as mech fighting.

Has anyone played both so that they could give me opinions as to which to invest my cash and time into? Do they do basically the same thing? ANy input is appreciated. Thanks.

Ninevehn said:

Lancer is an rpg, Battletech is a miniature wargame. They're both mecha, but they do very different things.

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Lancer is heavily influenced by D&D4e, so it's got some battlegrid combat chops, but it's designed for the sort of small-team (sub-squad level, even) tactics that you see in D&D or other miniatures-focused TTRPGs. I admit I don't really know from Battletech, so I don't know how involved its mecha combat is, but I would expect its combat to be a little more streamlined than Lancer's, just as most skirmish minis rules are considerably less complicated than D&D4e.

If anything, Battletech's combat is more complex then Lancers. It's on the crunchier end of things. Generally it's played as a 4 mech vs 4 mech battle, with each player controlling all the mechs on one side. Also, both sides use the same set of rules for things. Alpha strike uses a simpler combat system for the sake of getting more units on the table and is usually 12 vs 12 but remains a head to head game.

Lancer is a tactics heavy RPG. Combat is multiple players, each piloting one mech, vs the NPC who controls all the mechs on the opposing side. NPCs are built with different rules then PC mechs.

Yeah, Classic BattleTech is way more complex than Lancer, and that's just talking about mech fights, as soon as you start adding other things (vehicles, infantry, artillery and fighter support...) you are talking thousands of pages on rules

The fights also feel very different in both games, so you can have both and they fill different feelings of "mech combat". If you want to dive into BT, I would recommend better the Alpha Strike Box Set rathen than the Commander Manual, as it comes with some mechs, maps, buildings, tokens...

Battletech specifically also has a nice sliding scale of how many rules you do or do not want to use—at the lighter end, the beginner box is very simple, while at the heavier end there are half a dozen books of optional rules to get ever more granular. In fact, if the RPG thing is up your alley, there are two different Battletech RPGs.

When it comes to just the mech combat aspect, there are also two Battletech systems. Alpha Strike (the box set you're considering) is a little closer to a modern system in that it uses line of sight, uses terrain and rulers, etc. Classic Battletech, meanwhile, is more abstracted and plays out on a grid.

I'm not too familiar with Lancer, aside from hearing about it from some friends who were very into it. I guess my general impression is that Lancer is more fiddly when it comes to what each individual mech does—they're more comparable to a class in D&D or something like that. In Battletech, meanwhile, especially Classic Battletech, the core systems are more complicated (lots of stuff with heat/facing/movement speed and its effects on how hard it is to hit and be hit) but each individual mech plays more with the same deck of cards and you're less likely to run into something that's just entirely doing its own thing different from everyone else.

Yeah, Lancer is a powers based system, where all PC mechs are fairly modular. A lot of Lancer frames include gear that break the standard rules in some way and Players are encouraged to tinker and radically change things between missions. You can fully rebuild a mech and its gear in about 8 hours.

In Battletech, everything uses a standardized ruleset. Everything is built using the same rules, and with the gear. While you CAN customize things to a degree, it's still done with the initial building rules. How long it takes depends on what you're swapping around, with more core changes taking days or weeks in the engineering bay.